Akka http

Last time we talked about routing within Akka. This time we will be looking at Akka’s support for http.

But just before that, a bit of history. Before Akka.Http there was already a fairly successful Akk based http option available to you as a Scala developer, called Spray. There is a lot of Spray documentation available here http://spray.io/

This framework was extremely well thought of, so much so that the good people at Akka have taken on much of the good work done by this team, and it now forms much of the codebase for Akka Http.

In fact if you are familiar with Spray, you will certainly notice quite a lot of similarities in the way routes and JSON are handled in Akka.Http, as it is pretty much the Spray code.

Introduction

Akka.Http comes with server side and client side libraries. It also comes with good support for standard serialization such as JSON/XML and the ability to roll your own serialization should you want to.

It also comes with a fairly nifty routing DSL which is very much inspired by the work done in Spray.

This post will concentrate on the common use cases that you may come across when working with HTTP.

SBT Dependencies

As usual we need to make sure we have the correct JARs referenced. So here is the SBT file that I am using for both the server side/client side and common messages that pass between them

It can be seen that there are some common routing DSL bits and bobs in there, such as:

path : which satisfies the route name part of the route

get : which tells us that we should go further into the route matching if it’s a GET http request and it matched the path route DSL part

post: which tells us that we should go further into the route matching if it’s a POST http request and it matched the path route DSL part

complete : This is the final result from the route

These parts of the DSL are known as directives. The general anatomy of a directive is as follows:

name(arguments) { extractions =>
... // inner route
}

It has a name, zero or more arguments and optionally an inner route (The RouteDirectives are special in that they are always used at the leaf-level and as such cannot have inner routes). Additionally directives can “extract” a number of values and make them available to their inner routes as function arguments. When seen “from the outside” a directive with its inner route form an expression of type Route.

So again we use the path/get directives, but this time we complete with an Item. This is done due to the JSON support that is able to create the right serialization data for us. We will look at this in the next section

So again we use the path directive, but this time we use a post, where the post expects an item as JSON to be provided. The converting from the incoming JSON string to an Item is done using an Unmarshaller, we will look at this in the next section

So let’s see this one in postman

JSON Support

Akka.http provides JSON support using this library akka-http-spray-json-experimental which you can grab from Maven Central Repo.

JsonProtocol

When using spray we may use the SprayJsonProtocol and DefaultJsonProtocol to create the JSON protcol for your custom objects

Lets consider the Item class we have seen in the demos so far

package common
final case class Item(name: String, id: Long)

This is how we might write the JSON protocol code for this simple class

Luckily you don’t really have to get that involved with these that often as the routing DSL does most of the heavy lifting for you when you do the complete this is taken care of for you providing there is a marshaller that can be found implicitly

Unmarshalling

Unmarshalling is the process of taking the on the wire format (JSON string in these examples) back into a scala class (Item class in this case)

Luckily you don’t really have to get that involved with these that often as the routing DSL does most of the heavy lifting for you, which is what we use this part of the routing DSL, where this will use an unmarshaller to create the Item from the JSON string on the wire

entity(as[Item]) { item =>

WebSockets

Akka Http also supports web sockets too. Lets start this investigation with looking at what is required from the routing DSL perspective, which starts like this

So we need to supply a flow. A Flow is part of akka reactive streams which will look at in the next part. But for now just be aware that you can create a Flow from a Sink/Source and Materializer to materialize the flow.